I had some Pascal and other text files that had been stored on a magnetic tape and also some BACKUP savesets from VAXen that I used in the 80s. Some years ago I had all these transferred to CD-ROM. Now that I have VMS running under SIMH I tried to use these files and found that they all appeared to be illegible.
It turned out that in the transfer process all the file attributes had been lost. I was able to see this with a DIR/FULL which showed the following:
Record format: Undefined, maximum 0 bytes, longest 0 bytes
Record attributes: None
Record attributes: None
For the BACKUP saveset there is a freeware utility called RESET_BACKUP_SAVESET_FILE_ATTRIBUTES.COM which reads the block size from the saveset and then sets the file attributes accordingly. After using this command I was able to restore the BACKUP savesets and get all my files dating back to 1983!
For the text files that had not been stored in BACKUP savesets, I was able to restore their attributes using the following command:
SET FILE/ATTRIBUTE=(ORG:SEQ,RFM:VAR,RAT:CR)
This allowed me once again to see my old code and text files in all their glory.
Rob's Old Computers 